Kriscinda Meadows

Kriscinda Meadows is a recent MFA graduate from Chatham University's creative writing program (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA), where her thesis, Dread Confluence--a collection of strange and dark stories set in and around the city of Pittsburgh--placed second. In the last handful of years, Kriscinda has worked as a general flunky for The Gettysburg Review, managing editor of Chatham's The Fourth River, and assistant editor at Autumn House Press. She's also given academic papers on zombies in Oxford and Boston, and currently has an article pending publication in Fangoria magazine. Her writing preferences, obviously, lie on either end of the spectrum, from literary to horror, and everywhere in between. Currently, she spends her time writing, reading, learning piano, brushing up on her French, and is about to embark on a Pilates regimen that she hopes will not leave her broken.

The Donkey Farm

This would end badly. Despite the frivolity of the initial plan, Sandy knew quite suddenly that so much had not been accounted for. Her sweaty hands gripped the hard wheel of the yellow combi, fearing a slip might send them careening off the road and into a ditch—in her mind, vehicular accidents always wound up in a ditch. The thought was almost comical, much like the plan, though she knew that when the time came to extricate her torso from the steering wheel and pull her face from the windshield, the humor would be lost. The humor was always lost.

Sandy Fields: that was her real name. It was a poor porn name, a friend had told her, that would prohibit her entrance into the industry, should she ever choose to go that route. Abrasive, the friend had said; the name Sandy Fields was at once inviting, and abrasive. James Ryan occupied the passenger seat. Not Jim or Jimmy. These monikers were silly, he’d said. With a name like that, no one would take him seriously as a sober entity with ideas and positions on important global topics. He’d said this to her only about an hour before a boisterous, inebriated, and entirely unprovoked exclamation about loving donkeys. That was five months ago in Oxford, where they had first met.

Today, this morning, they’d robbed the Malop Street branch of Bendigo bank in Geelong, Australia, and were now tearing mercilessly along the A300 northwest toward the Grampians National Park as if Gary Ablett had launched them cosmically into the air like a lemon colored football. They would connect to the Western Highway at Ballarat and then hit the C216 at Stawell, following that to Hall’s Gap. They’d continue through the tiny town and into the park. She thought they’d have to ditch Mellie at some point, Mellie being James’s much-loved combi van. She was a 1974 Devon Conversion that had somehow made its way from London to Geelong. He had talked about her in Oxford and, at first, Sandy thought she was some lost, out-of-reach lover. She was bouncy, smooth, fun, and chilled. He wanted to drive her forever. Sandy wished men would talk about her like that. She had made a mental note to somehow be more like Mellie, which might’ve been part of why they were in this situation. She knew they couldn’t really abandon Mellie—Mellie was as much a cohort as they were.

What the plan had become through necessity wasn’t ideal, but it was the best they could do. She had memorized the escape route and now spotted a sign indicating they were about to enter and quickly pass Buninyong. This meant their first connection was in sixteen kilometers or so. Her sombrero, the widest she could get her hands on, was crushed uncomfortably between her back and the seat, the cord biting into the front of her throat. She’d been driving like that for sixty-five kilometers and it occurred to her only now to adjust it. It was too big to wear in the combi, which was a disappointment. James wore his, as it was just a bit smaller. ‘Siesta!’ was written in cursive with some kind of pink plastic gel over the dyed woven zig-zags along its brim. He looked grim sitting to her left, clutching to his chest a large beige canvas bag marked ‘SWAG’ in black Sharpie. That had also been a detail of the plan. They had to have a cartoonish ‘swag’ bag, for the swag. His face was awash in regret.

She had seen this before. Cider drew it easily to the surface, but this time the effect was sober and immediate, clearer to him than any regret he might have felt about anything else, ever.

“This is what we said we’d do!” she yelled over the cacophony of air rushing around them. The windows were down and the wind threatened to blow away their fake mustaches. Hers flapped. The adhesive was giving way to the gale and a sweaty film that had pooled between it and her upper lip. They were both covered with dirt that streaked and accentuated the fine lines creeping about their young faces. He didn’t answer. She glanced at him. They were going as fast as they could go. Eyes back on the road but she saw him long enough to see he was staring at her, his own mustache, big and black, fluttering around the mesh edges. The water pistols they’d used to rob the bank clacked together on the floor of the cab.

“This was the plan!” she yelled again to stress the point.

“I know!” James yelled back, pressing his mustache down until it found purchase on a faintly freckled lip. He lifted his sombrero to get a little air under it then dropped it again on his wet, red hair. “I remember the plan,” he said. He opened the top of the swag bag, peered in, and whistled, a fresh wave of concern washing over him.

Sandy looked again. James looked a bit like Jethro.

She remembered how she had met James. They had met among others having drinks at the Oxford Retreat, a pub that served a good Bloody Mary, and by that definition, wasn’t a place to get pissed on Weston’s and Guinness, which is exactly what they’d done. Before they’d spilled out onto the pavement, still clutching feebly at half empty pint glasses, they’d established that she was an American ‘finding herself’ by backpacking through the UK and he was an Australian working hospitality at the Hilton on a six month Working Holiday visa, the end of which he was nearing. After leaving the pub, they’d spent the next three days in a Hilton hotel room on his discount drinking, talking, and bathing. That was where the plan had germinated and generated into something that seemed feasible to their drunk and desperate minds.

The plan—that had gone through some minor adjustments in execution, but now faced larger modifications—was as follows: They would each leave whatever situation needed leaving and meet in Geelong, Australia. Once there, they would obtain Mexican bandito costumes: ponchos, sombreros, mustaches were optional, but they both opted for them in the end. The sombreros were more touristy than they’d expected so they rolled themselves around in the dirt in an attempt to enhance the overall authenticity.

After obtaining the necessary swag bag they would rob a bank and stuff Mellie with the ill-gotten notes. Their means of transport at this point was supposed to have been donkeys, but, after reflecting on the whole concept of donkey preservation, they decided that exploiting them for this purpose would be hypocritical. So, it was straight to Mellie. They would then find some tropical natural wonder and clean themselves off beneath falling waters, amid the scent of eucalyptus and acacia.

There would then be a costume change—white suits and fedoras, cigars and thinner fake mustaches. These would also be optional. They would make a clean getaway. They would take up residence in Mellie and haunt the shores of Corio Bay, incognito. They would head inland, skirting the edges of the Barwon River down to the Otway Ridges. They would swim north up the Moorabool and frolic naked in the Lal Lal Reservoir. They would start afresh, and with the stolen funds, they would eventually start their own donkey farm. They were going to save the donkeys. They would save the donkeys—as many as they could—and they would grow old together on a beachfront oasis of asses, drinking in the sun, eating pumpkin soup. It had to be pumpkin soup. That was the plan.

Sandy peeked over at James again, who was staring vaguely out the window. She could never pinpoint what it was she liked about a man, if she liked him. She was a self-conscious sort, always wondering why anyone liked her—if they liked her—but never daring to ask. So, she felt she should be able to articulate her own affections, should anyone want to know themselves. Had James asked—and he never did—she might have said: It was the lime green sweater. It was his ability to clean up nicely, and even after cleaning up nicely, the ability to make an ass of himself anyway. It was the way he said he'd take care of his responsibilities. This was something she knew instinctively to be true despite the carefree surferesque attitude that so characterized combi owners, despite the downing of his sixth cider, grinning crookedly and allowing his cell phone ring itself into an unanswered frenzy. James had a clear-blue, ocean-like quality, the very clarity of which was too brilliant and abstract to really see. Rather than try to discern fish from flotsam, or reefs from wrecks, it seemed best to just fall in and float to the bottom, catching what she could on the way down. She wondered if she'd drowned.

She’d never found herself by backpacking, as she'd meant to. This truth caused her great concern. She wondered if she was incapable of filling in her own gaps, from within, the way writers and lifestyle philosopher's said was the only way it could be done. She wondered how much she had to take from outside herself to fill the gaps, and if too much transformed her into someone else. These things kept her awake. She felt herself burdened with a spastic personality that darted in strange and unexpected directions. Life was supposed to have been better choreographed; one was supposed to get to know the basic techniques before tap-stepping it out onto the floor to do the East Coast Swing. This was especially true if you wanted a dance partner. Sandy didn't dance through life—she skipped, stomped, and staggered, springing like a marionette whose strings were elastic. It wasn't a case of two left feet, but of too many feet, or sometimes not enough. She wriggled like an octopus, or hopped around, falling this way and that. In fact, it seemed she felt truly comfortable only when she fell over and landed in something vast enough to swallow her whole. James was that thing—a gaping maw in which to throw herself—which explained the speedy attachment. That, and it seemed to Sandy that James couldn’t dance either. She was looking for someone to dance badly with, together, having a laugh as they tread on one another’s toes.

At this moment, bouncing about in the speeding combi, she couldn’t remember why donkeys had come up. Then she realized that she hadn’t forgotten, she’d never known, not even at the time. It had just come from him, a happy cider-flavored proclamation that might come from a New Year’s celebrator: “I love donkeys!” She decided, right then and there, that she loved donkeys too.

When the debauchery in Oxford ended, James was on a plane back to Australia via Hong Kong to take care of some business. Family stuff. Budding family stuff. He’d explained, after a few ciders, eyes swimming slightly, that she was pregnant. Not Sandy, certainly not Mellie, but his long-time, on-and-off-again girlfriend. It seemed, through a series of ill-fated fecund events, she’d become the permanent on-again girlfriend. Biological happenstance. It wasn’t until the switch had been irrevocably flicked that he realized the off-position of the relationship was more suitable to his needs. Now, there were responsibilities.

This wasn’t exactly Sandy’s idea of domestic bliss. In fact, she wasn’t sure that anything defined as ‘domesticated’—like the conquering of a plant or an animal—could be described as ‘bliss.’ Vague memories of The Feminine Mystique from an old Woman’s Studies class always made her think of how men were actually short shrifted in this department. It seemed to her that though women being emotionally and intellectually stifled through domesticity and childbearing and rearing was undeniable and unquestionably wrong, men were in equal danger when it came to that suffocating traditional 1950s arrangement—the Nuclear Family. It was just as deadening to be forced into the 9-to-5 workaday routine—eat, sleep, provide, eat, sleep, provide. They said it was good for the kids, that the only way a child could possibly grow up to be even remotely well-adjusted was from within a solid unit, minimum of three persons—father, mother, and child. Apparently, love in the marriage didn’t fit into the equation. Divergence was an abomination to all good members society and should be attacked with a mob-like intensity. To stray from this formula was to invite a lifetime of guilt.

Universal moral law stated very clearly that if you were going to fire up the oven and bake a loaf of bread, you were now and forever a baker. You would do nothing but bake bread. Nothing. There was one recipe for the bread, of common domesticated wheat flour, and one better not deviate from that recipe or the bread might come out tasting funny. Sandy liked bread with a little flavor—rosemary and rye, barely or oats, injera flatbread—something out of the ordinary. There were many ways to bake a good loaf, and it didn’t always mean sticking to the same tired recipe. The bread would still come out just fine in the end, and best of all, the bakers would be happy to be able to branch out.

She just didn’t see James as a baker, as a domestic. He would make an excellent father, and probably even an excellent husband. But he needed to be in love. Sandy made this assumption because she couldn’t imagine herself in a loveless relationship. There were ways of expressing love, but sticking around to be a provider wasn’t one of them; neither was forcing someone to engage in a domestic practice that wasn’t natural to them. She couldn’t figure out why his on-again girlfriend wanted him to grind off his corners just to fit into the traditional round slot. Why couldn’t she accommodate him with his own square niche on the board? That, to Sandy, was one thing a person could do to express love. You don’t hammer your loved one over the head as hard as you can until they’re pegged in so tightly they can never work free again—you do everything you can to accommodate their special shape; it was supposed to be that shape you fell in love with in the first place, right?

Sandy didn’t know why she thought she knew anything about anything. While James was trying to hammer flat the kinks in the corrugated tin that was his life, she was wandering around rather aimlessly. Apparently, her idea, maybe not of love, but of something akin to it, was forming outrageous plans with the first loveable person she could find and insisting they be carried out. After James left, she’d moved onto Bath—where she stalled—and stayed at a local backpacker’s hostel. She was surprised to find that, even sober, she thought the plan had merit. Soon she was familiar with a handful of websites for donkey sanctuaries in England. Just a few clicks lead her to the adopt-a-donkey pages and the next thing she knew she was on a train to Leeds, on her way to meet her adopted donkey, Jethro.

Jethro was the biggest donkey she’d ever seen, and she’d seen her fair share of donkeys. They were always small, or so she’d thought. She’d never ridden a donkey, but she’d seen others riding donkeys. It had always seemed an unfair burden for the poor beast struggling beneath them. But this one—Jethro—was massive. He was a russet Mammoth Jack, the giant ginger of donkeys. She learned later that coloring was dependent on size, the larger the donkey, the deeper the color. Jethro had been around, originating in the US, bred from the Maltese, the Poitou, the Andalusia, and the Catalonian. He had somehow managed to find himself packing in Venezuela.

Apparently, Sandy had learned, the donkey—as a species—took a long time to break, to get him to let people ride him and work him. Scientists, she had read, could tell from examining the skeletons of funerary donkeys—joints rubbed and wore in patterns that spoke to what purpose they served, whether they were wild or not. Meta-carpals and mid-shafts showed the deterioration and adaptation that comes with weight bearing activities. Studying the skeletons from an Abydos grave in Africa, they found that it was only 5,000 years ago that the donkey showed signs of an intermediate phase—between being feral and becoming beasts of burden. Goats were domesticated around 10,000 to 11,000 years ago. Sandy wondered sadly how long James would take to become domesticated. Sooner or later, he’d have to learn the steps, to bake the bread of common wheat flour—his tin, once corrugated, would lie flat, smooth as a plank. He’d have to bear the weight.

“Can I ride him?” was the first thing she asked when she’d met Jethro. She had an overwhelming need to do this. Riding smaller donkeys seemed wrong, but he looked built to ride. Before she realized the infeasibility of it, she’d made a mental note that they would have to make their escape on Mammoths and not on a tiny donkey, like some English or Irish breed. Maybe a couple of Australian Teamsters.

“No,” the keeper said. “No, you can’t.” He was taken aback by the question, but she pressed.

“Why not?” She didn’t mean to push it; she genuinely wanted to know—Jethro looked too much like a riding donkey.

“Don’t you think he’s been through enough?” the keeper asked, befuddled. Sandy got it and nodded vigorously. Jethro had been rescued from a site in the Andes. He’d been a tourist packer, hauling fat bastards up and down winding, narrow paths. Though still young and still capable of making his donkey contribution to society, he’d been inexplicably corralled in a tiny enclosure. When she’d sent her first year of adoption fees the keeper had explained that Jethro had had a little bit of room, but not enough even for a full turn. No one knew how long he’d been there, but it didn’t matter. Had it been six minutes or six years, it was inexcusable. Donkeys, Sandy decided, should be free.

In the past five months, since that drunken conspiratorial holiday at the Hilton, she’d visited Jethro a number of times and every time she saw him, his corral seemed smaller. That couldn’t have been the case; the conservatory took good care of their charges. Sandy, though, pictured Jethro wild. He should be wild, she’d think as she made sure her fingers didn’t disappear into his mouth with the carrots. He looked like James. It was the ginger hair and the small eyes that pleaded, not especially to her, but in general. He looked as if he could carry the weight, and in reality, he could. But he didn’t want to. He didn’t want the burden; he didn’t want the fences. He wanted an infinite plain of brush land. Perhaps someone to drop by on occasion to pet him and feed him carrots. Jethro, of course, said none of this, but Sandy was sure she’d heard it. She felt the plan had to be undertaken. James and Sandy had kept in touch via email and the occasional phone call. The closer it came to taking the bread out of the oven, the more antsy James became. Sandy took that as a sign that he really wanted to execute the donkey plans as well. He didn’t say no. Maybe they couldn’t pull off a whole donkey conservatory, but they could free Jethro. In this one case, they needed to undo 5,000 years of evolution in captivity that should never have happened.

Sandy wove Mellie through the slower traffic, positioning them for the Western Highway connection. Tires screeched.

“Careful!” James yelled, bracing himself, his sombrero slipping to the side and the swag bag almost ejecting out the window. She grimaced and wondered why she was driving; it was his van. She looked at him again. Grimsville.

“This isn’t going as planned,” she said. Snatching glances into the rearview. There was still no one in pursuit, no sirens screaming behind them, no bullhorns with Aussie accents demanding they pull over, mate.

“No, no it’s not,” he replied. It occurred to her that he was, at this moment, stone sober. This might have been the first time they’d been together, both of them sober. Sandy didn’t feel this was a negative comment on the nature of their relationship. She thought fondly of how, when drunk, he couldn’t help but fall down. It was endearing because it allowed her to prop him up, to somehow lift his dead drunken weight onto her small frame and get him back on his feet again, no matter how unsteady. This was how she’d become sure he was no dancer. Now, she wasn’t so sure.

“Should we stop?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he responded. He looked at her. She felt obliged to answer for the both of them, but that wasn’t fair. Not to her, not to him.

“You don’t love her,” she started, but stopped when his face asked what that could possibly have to do with the situation at hand. She stopped also, not because the statement was irrelevant or untrue, but because she knew he didn’t love her either. Deep inside, she knew that. Something in her clicked. It was the emotional equivalence of an arrhythmia, a stumbling hitch in the head and heart. She knew this achy feeling. It was always vague in construct; she wouldn’t know what had happened until later. All she knew was that something had turned inside. She knew because it manifested in her thinking as a seemingly unrelated defense mechanism. The only thing that mattered—right that minute—was freeing Jethro.

“This was a bad plan.” James shook his head and smiled an unamused smile seemingly at his own stupidity.

“It was a fine plan,” she said, “just not a smart plan.” At this understatement he laughed. “Look,” she began, glancing from him, to the road, to the review, and back. “We have to keep going now. We have to free Jethro. It’s important.”

His face fell as his eyes searched the air for the Jethro slot in his memory. It seemed distant, but he found it and his face went red.

“The donkey?” he asked. “The fucking donkey?” Sandy looked at him and despite herself she knew she appeared hurt. It was on her face too quickly for her to block it—the very idea that freeing Jethro wasn’t as important to him as it was to her broke her heart. Valves and ventricles slipped down her rib cage and into her gut, which had folded on itself. James softened.

“It was a joke,” he said with as much patience as his current fear and confusion could muster. “I don’t know how it got this far. I don’t know what I was thinking.” He was turned in the passenger’s seat towards her, twisting beneath the safety harness, the swag bag bouncing on his knees. His mustache flapped. “I was drunk, Sandy. I was joking. I was just having some fun. You have to know that.”

There was a short pause that lasted forever, a stretch of silence being transported at 120 kilometers per hour in a shaking yellow combi van through southern Australia’s temperate bushlands. What about the plan? What about the mountains and beaches, the rivers and waterfalls? What about the stars and the sun, and their sleeping, backs against the earth? What about the emancipation? James was slipping into his dancing shoes and baker’s hat, she thought. He was going to grind away his corners and lose his shape. He was about to take too much from the outside and become someone else. Sandy gazed at the road ahead, easing off the gas a little but not much. She thought she would cry.

“I knew that,” she said more to herself than to him. She wanted to close her eyes and sleep. Instead, a smile erupted across her dirty face and she reached behind her to pull out the crushed, sweaty sombrero. As she handed it to him, she gave him a look as if he had lost his mind. He must have, just as she had, or they wouldn’t be where they are now, hurtling toward a national park—filthy mustachioed banditti with loads of swag. Blue and red lights finally appeared in the rearview on the horizon.

“I knew that,” she said again, as if it had been obvious. Of course it was all just a joke. Her foot tensed between pressing down and pulling up. “What do you want to do? Now’s a good time to say.” Sandy could swear she heard the sirens—droning into a 2/4 beat waltz neither of them could dance to—though they were too far off for that. James took his time to answer. They held their speed; Mellie hummed.

“Just keep going,” he finally let out in a breath, pulling the swag bag closer to himself. Sandy grinned and hit the gas.